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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand who all these people are who keep saying 'but I need twitter for my local politicians.' Like really? I have not followed any local politicians or authorities twitter and I still get relevant information. Believe it or not, which you might not if all you do is parrot these comments and I have seen this very comment line of thinking parroted for YEARS about twitter, most people do not follow the city hall twitter if they even have a twitter, and they get by fine. I mean people are citing they need to follow their utility. Are you kidding me? Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

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Where I live currently in Europe utility companies need to inform me even in an offline way. There is no need for internet for this.

I'm reading the news with a two week delay for almost a decade, and I haven't missed anything worthwhile. There are exactly zero reasons to read Facebook/Twitter for it. For example, the value of the current US administration's word is zero. When they say something, there is no change in probability distributions in anything anymore. This two week delay makes this very obvious on the occasions when I checked the latest state of some issues. But others are the same, just for different reasons: in reality you have a very small effect on any highly politicized topics. When parents trust their kids less than politicians, then there is not much to do with everyday tools, like arguing (there are some places where there is a value, but those won't ever move the needle).

That is an European privilege. Paper costs money so in the global south companies want to get rid of it asap because money is much more scarce for everyone because many things are imported from industrialized countries

The current American government is basically entirely comprised of people who were terminally online on Twitter and communicating with the right politicians - those people got everything they wanted. This seems like evidence that it actually does matter.

Remember when Obama was lauded as the first 'online' president, with everyone from Redditors to news media gushing about his BlackBerry? What is the point you are trying to make, aside from "VC-funded apps and smartphones and how we use them have naturally evolved since 2008"?

I got through the first trump presidency without reading his tweets. I'm halfway through the second with the same streak. I don't expect this should change. What is the worst he tweets, nukes away? I would rather have my remaining 15 minutes be of peace.

I've always had this thought that the Trump administration's views of other countries comes disproportionately from insanely online users on Twitter and Reddit, who might actually be bots too. Like the thing about not working with European countries "that hate us."

> Your utility will post a highly localized service outage that might only affect 1 block of a city or less to their world facing twitter feed? And not simply alert customers via their phone on file as they've done for me forever?

It doesn't match your very contrived example specifically, but yes essential services in my major metropolitan area provide more useful and timely information via twitter/X than other sources. People don't or can't register for updates from the city or county, so government organizations have no means of publishing information for public consumption other than social media, and twitter was the de facto standard.

Also, many local schools, clubs, etc. used it as their "official" source for updates for years.

You are definitely out of the loop if you can't access it, and places are glacially slow to change.

Is it possible to help or encourage our local municipal services to have either an RSS or BlueSky feed? At this point, it's becoming apparent that putting all the information eggs in the twitter basket is/was a bad idea. This is a place where open source standards should shine.

This is an area where Mastodon ought to shine. Departments/organisations can create their own instances, with named users. Interested constituents follow those users with their client of choice. Direct following means you avoid the federation dramas.

No algorithim means that people get the updates they want when they're posted. Users get a familiar-looking client to bang out the quick updates.

Obviously the issue is someone will need to run it, but if you're not open to public signups then the moderation burden doesn't exist and it's just a case of keeping things updated.

On the last point, it's a lot harder to manage than you're making it sound. A public org isn't going to gate signups.

You wouldn't let Joe Public create an email account on your mail server, why would you let them do so on a mastodon instance?

Sorry, I misread your first comment. So only the org can post and people can only view. Doesn't seem like people would follow it then.

But that's not how Mastodon works.

Like email, I sign up for a Mastodon account on a server that suits my tastes. I then follow other accounts, on other servers, using a client - I use Ivory on the mac & iPhone (because it's made by the same company who made Tweetbot) - and those accounts show up in my feed in chronological order, like Twitter in the old days.

I'm not going to say RSS is inherently inaccessible to normies, because the blogosphere of 20 years ago saw even elderly non-techies happily using it. However, I think the trends in computing in the years since, where most people use the internet solely through popular phone apps, mean that RSS is no longer going to see any significant use. So, a municipality is not doing a palpable service to its constituency by moving communications there.

We even saw it with RSS. Everyone using RSS was lamenting Google Reader going away. Isn't the client supposed to be the most easily replaceable part of RSS?

It's weird that people still lament Google Reader going away.

We've had RSS for about 27 years.

Google Reader was around for less than 8 of those years, and it has now been 13 years since it died.

Normies dont think in protocols, they think in apps.

Websites said "follow our RSS feed," not "follow on Google Reader." Then again maybe normies never used RSS.

The most practical way would probably be to create that feed yourself based on their Twitter feed. You could automate it using some Nitter-like service (please do not scrape public Nitters, but you can run your own Nitter and scrape it as you like). It is generally easier to do something like this yourself than to convince someone else, who does not care at all, to do it. I don't know how you would advertise it.

How about municipal councils looking around at any remaining "mainstream media" local outlets and committing to post relevant notices/updates on their websites?

This is something I wanted to push while working on newsroom CMS projects: giving direct input access to the CMS from external bodies - police, fire, ambulance etc. Posts could be vetted/edited by newsrooms, as with any externally filed copy, but turnaround would be a matter of half-a-minute or so. Either that or enable direct publishing permissions to said authorities.

OK, I am out of the loop. But, my point is, what loop? What is an essential piece of information that was only possible to reach you via twitter? Did this make or break your life recently? Would there truly have been no other way for you to find this information out?

Road closures, youth sports/school schedule changes due to things like weather, etc.

Is it possible to live without this knowledge? Of course. But it's not unreasonable to me that people would want to receive this sort of information or that it is of some value to them, or that they'd rather have it pushed to them in an app on their phone than have to call friends or the school office to find out whether the status of some event has changed.

When there is a road closure it gets pushed to the systems that hook into google maps to reroute navigation. And short of that, there are also detour signs that redirect you around the obstruction.

If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.

You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.

> When there is a road closure it gets pushed to the systems that hook into google maps to reroute navigation.

Sure it does, everywhere. (/s in case that isn't clear, this doesn't always happen in my area which has several Google offices, let alone other less populated areas)

> And short of that, there are also detour signs that redirect you around the obstruction.

Sure, which you could have avoided entirely had you known about the issue.

> If something happened e.g. a snow day at school surely you could call the office and find that out. There is no way twitter is the sole source of that sort of information. I guarantee it is on their school website.

School closures for weather, yes, but not everything, and often they are slow to update, and people would rather not call (and the central office would rather not field those calls).

> You have to remember that the world has to work for the senile old person too.

And you have to remember that not everyone seems to be seeking out inconvenience as much as you.

No one is saying it's impossible to survive without push notifications about local events, they are saying that twitter became a de facto standard for that years ago because it was the best option for publishing small updates by local governments and other similar organizations, and now that twitter has devolved into its current state there is no good alternative and people are slow to change.

All my local groups are on facebook. It's horrendous. Could do with a browser plugin which only shows posts I want to see, it might even be good enough to send me back to facebook

I think the last facebook group I was participant of was in school some 15 or 20 years ago before parents were allowed to make their own facebook accounts. Life has been just fine without any such dependence on twitter or facebook. It is always surprising to me how the people who use these networks so religiously cannot imagine living without them. I am here to say that yes, it is possible, and probably more people around your periphery are living like that to success without you even realizing it.

Sure, I'll just tell my kids they can't do any extra curricular activities

Right. The you (and I, elsewhere) are responding to about this obviously doesn't have any kids or meaningful interaction with their community.

There's nothing wrong with living that way, but their lack of perspective or understanding that most people don't get to decide what mode of communication a medium to large sized bureaucracy uses to inform its members/constituents about information it has to share is something.

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